peter matthiessen | zen master

10102008

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 156 | October 9, 2008

PETER MATTHIESSEN

(NPR Oct. 8, 2008)

First:

If you have never read him, don’t leave the planet till you do.

Second:

If you’ve never read him; if it’s been a long time since you read him; if you’re surprised he’s still alive (83); if you have children and grandchildren and you feel it’s important that they be left with all the wonders of the natural world; if you think politics and nature are essential to man’s survival; if you think whoever is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this week, it won’t be Peter Matthiessen (but should be); if you have any interest whatsoever in the role of Zen in a man’s life and art; if you feel there is no one left to be trusted, given the culture, the politics of spokespeople and leadership in the world; if you would like to “meet” Matthiessen, the mind and soul of the man, “listen up” to one of the best interviews you will ever experience on NPR, the program “On Point” hosted, just yesterday, by Tom Ashbrook.

Make

a pot of green tea. Have a beer. A snifter or brandy, a glass of Scotch (neat). Tune in….

The

world needs to listen “Zen Master” Matthiessen, while there’s still time. Norbert Blei

Peter Matthiessen (born May 22, 1927, in New York City) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer and an environmental activist. Matthiessen’s work is known for its meticulous approach to research. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In theSpirit of Crazy Horse.

Along with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and Donald Hall, Matthiessen founded the literary magazineThe Paris Review in 1953. At the time he was a young recruit for the CIA.

In 1965, Matthiessen wrote a novel about a group of American missionaries and a South American tribe. The book was later made into a major Hollywood film with the same title, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in 1991. In 1979, Matthiessen’s nonfiction book The Snow Leopard won the Contemporary Thought category of the National Book Award. His work on oceanographic research, “Blue Meridian,” with photographer Peter A. Lake, documented the making of the film “Blue Water, White Death,” which was directed by Peter Gimbel and Jim Lipscomb. This is widely considered to have inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws in 1974. Matthiessen has been the official State Author of New York, 1995-1997.

More recently, Matthiessen’s fiction trilogy Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone was based on accounts of Florida planter Edgar J. Watson’s death shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910.

Shortly after the 1983 publication of In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen and his publisher Viking Penguin were sued for libel by FBI agent David Price and former South Dakota governor William J. Janklow. The plaintiffs sought over $49 million in damages; Janklow also successfully sued to have all copies of the book withdrawn from bookstores. After four years of litigation, Federal District Court Judge Diana E. Murphy dismissed Price’s lawsuit, upholding Matthiessen’s right “to publish an entirely one-sided view of people and events.” In the Janklow case, a South Dakota court also ruled for Matthiessen. Both cases were appealed. In 1990, the Supreme Court refused to hear Price’s arguments, effectively ending his appeal; the South Dakota Supreme Court dismissed Janklow’s case the same year. With the lawsuits settled, the paperback edition of the book was finally published in 1992.

In his book The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reports having a somewhat tempestuous on-again off-again relationship with his wife Deborah, culminating in a deep commitment to each other made shortly before she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in New York City near the end of 1972. She and Matthiessen had four children; the youngest of them, Alex Matthiessen, was 7 or 8 years old at the time of her death. In September of the following year, Matthiessen went on an expedition to the Himalayas with field biologist George Schaller.

Matthiessen and Deborah practiced Zen Buddhism. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga. He lives in Sagaponack, New York.

Bibliography

Fiction

* Race Rock (1954)

* Partisans (1955)

* Raditzer (1961)

* At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965)

* Far Tortuga (1975)

* On the River Styx and Other Stories (1989)

* Killing Mister Watson (1990)

* Lost Man’s River (1997)

* Bone by Bone (1999)

* Shadow Country (2008) (a new rendering of the Watson trilogy)

Nonfiction

* Wildlife in America (1959)

* The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961)

* Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962)

* “The Atlantic Coast”, a chapter in The American Heritage Book of Natural Wonders (1963)

other Norbert Blei web pages

The coop has flown

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Norbert Blei | 1935 – 2013

On the back roads of Door County again

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Bobbie Krinsky

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Jeffrey Winke

Norbert Blei – 2011

Photo by Sharon Auberle

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